With the New Year days away, many people set out to make resolutions to improve themselves in the coming year. Sadly, most folks will not succeed in their efforts. An article recently published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology explored this phenomenon. Several potential reasons for the lack of success people experience with resolutions were explored, including the idea that resolutions are primarily an attempt at self-motivation, which fall short when the person making the resolution isn’t actually motivated to make long term changes in their lifestyle. Another reason the article sets forth is that resolutions are often unrealistic, and when they turn out to be unattainable the individual quits. What all of the various psychological explanations have in common is that the individual struggles with maintaining their new year’s resolution changes because the assumption is that they will result in an improvement to their lives in general. When the changes either do not noticeably impact quality of life or they do not make the person feel better about life in general, they are abandoned. When losing weight, saving more money, or paying off debt fail to yield sufficient happiness, the changes simply don’t take hold. Often, New Year’s resolutions are attached to a sort of false hope that change will come easily and will result in everything being better. In reality, changing behavior is difficult and often requires that we change our thinking, the ways we view ourselves, and how we cope with the world around us. Behavioral change is difficult because it is a product of significant self change. For example, if I deal with stress by eating, then try to simply eliminate eating as a coping mechanism without replacing it with something else, I will eventually come back to eating as a way of dealing with my problems in life. Developing healthier responses to stress, like talking or exercising, or new ways of looking at difficult situations, like seeing them as challenges of faith, are necessary to fill in the hole left by the poor coping skill that has been abandoned. These efforts toward long term change are good, but should be engaged in with a full awareness that the effort is difficult and often involves bigger changes. Further, they will likely involve some forethought and planning for the long term.
To be fair, not all changes are related to bad habits and poor coping. Some resolutions relate to things like spending more time with the family, reading more, or eating out less. In these instances, the key to success is often connected to making clear, measurable, achievable goals and establishing some degree of accountability to ensure follow-through. These elements help with all changes, largely because goals are easier to accomplish when these basic elements are considered.
